What does bike-riding, climate-championing, granola-crunching, weird and wacky Portland, Oregon, have in common with the bleak, smouldering, poisonous mines of Alberta's tar sands? Soon they might share in common an economic interest in exporting fossil fuels from the tar sands to Asian markets.

ERM Group, the consultancy selected by TransCanada to conduct the environmental review for Keystone XL's northern leg on behalf of the U.S. State Department, once bribed a Chinese official to ram through major pieces of an industrial development project. ERM was tasked to push through the project in Hangzhou Bay, located near Shanghai.

The week of the Exxon Valdez disaster anniversary and a week after the Council of Canadians released a report highlighting the threat that tar sands oil imposes on the Great Lakes, BP did what it always does: crapped up Lake Michigan.

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is "caused" by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Obama's environmental record is mixed, at best, but Keystone XL offers him an opportunity to lead the world toward eliminating carbon pollution and changing the balance of power in the climate crisis. There would certainly be a high political cost to rejecting the pipeline, but that is not a sufficient excuse for a president who cares about his legacy.

There's a certain level of madness in using ever more extreme technologies to wring ever-dwindling supplies of black gold from Mother Earth. The safest way to insure that one's retirement nest egg lasts a lifetime is to live only on the interest.

This fast isn't about us. We're fasting because people are suffering and dying from the impacts of climate change, in the Philippines and all over the world. We're fasting because we can't wait any longer to act.

We're not easily intimidated. It may have been awhile since we acted like it as a whole, but this is still the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we don't take kindly to outsiders pushing us around.

Frank Giustra - key power broker and close colleague of former President Bill Clinton - has taken a seat on the Board of Directors of U.S. Oil Sands, an Alberta-based company aiming to develop tar sands deposits in Utah's Uintah Basin.

In June Obama said he will not approve the pipeline if it would significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. Today the Sierra Club, Oil Change International, and 13 partner groups have released a report that settles the issue: Keystone XL would be a climate disaster.